Ever wondered which apps installed on your iPhone or iPad can read Word documents, for example, or display PDFs? Most us collect apps like a drier collects socks and it can be difficult to tell why an app is still installed on your device!

To find out, open an email that has an attachment of the kind you want to know about (if you can’t find one, just send a new email to yourself with a file attached), then tap and hold the file attachment. The share menu will pop up, but with a difference – you’ll be offered a choice of apps that can open the attachment (which means they can read that kind of file). With some popular filetypes, like PDFs, there might be several apps that are compatible, and to see them all you might have to scroll through the list by dragging your thumb left and right.

Tap Cancel when you’ve learned all you need from the list or, in the case of an iPad, simply tap outside the pop-up window.